Planet of the Blind

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of the broken heart to go around
I would not tell you if it wasn’t so
The trick of poetry is attention

Look at the dish I serve this on
in the Wedgewood
Aristotle’s finger prints…

**

The vatic voice really isn’t for me
I’ve too much fidelity with truth
For instance: coins are the enemies of arthritis
The barometer has killed more indigenous people
than can be counted…

**

Come on now, leave the ponies alone…

* 

Life freed of ideas about life, which is of course life itself…

**

Wind in the alders. A mourning dove. Rain on the roof.
The grownups asleep.
And the little dog keeps track of things at the window.

I am a writer who speaks about the importance of disability as a dynamic of power which means I believe cripples are at the center of life itself. Perhaps another way to say this is that life is imperfection regardless of whatever Richard Dawkins might say. (Dawkins understands DNA as a purity symbol rather than a concatenation of genetic mistakes.) (One may think of Dawkins and all social Darwinists this way.) (It is altogether splendid to see Jeremy Bentham taxidermed with his head down by his feet.)

Disability is life itself. Not an idea about life; not a held breath and a prayer; not a shrug or shudder. As the poet Marvin Bell once put it, life will blow you apart. I’m often in the position of urging the temporarily normal to admit that life is nefarious, thrilling, dark, urgent, and never without dynamism. All the sad metaphors employed against disability are failures of the intellect.

The random errors which produce "junk" DNA–the mutations in our genes, are in fact, wait for it, "random." Richard Dawkins is weak in this area as he prefers the ghost in the machine that’s always looking to improve itself, an idea which no respectable paleo-geneticist believes.

Disability is neither good or evil. It’s a natural fact. And it makes for beauty just as anything will if it’s understood properly.

So forgive me for starting with a grayness but as I recently joked with a paralyzed friend, “I feel like a battered old fish with many dents in his flesh”—the context—that it’s not probable I’ll see the advances I’d hoped for us when the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted over a quarter century ago. I’m old enough to be feeling what academics call accidie, a weariness, and if I’m not defeated I’m suspicious. Shorthand: we haven’t gotten far enough, and daily the news is incontestable. The “fish conceit” is what can happen to believers and how not to become the fish is the story (mine and yours) since disability bias surrounds us. (Bias is a story with many chapters like Bocaccio and knowing it never renders comfort, though if you’re a bigot you may enjoy schadenfreude. I once had an “iffy” friend who practiced “vengeance fantasy”—as he said, doing it nearly as much as he masturbated, seeing his enemies staked out in the Colosseum with lions chewing at their entrails, etc. He’d rub his hands and imitate Charles Laughton: “how do you like your God now, Christian?”)

Bias is a variorum edition. My spotty pal really meant what he said—if he’d had his way he’d have fried you in oil. Everyone has his own grayness. Discrimination, personified, wants us to join the Centurions, at least inside, and its first sign is indifference. In my experience street theater is one way to resist it. Thirty years ago when I was a Fulbright Scholar in Helsinki, Finland I went one night to a gritty, working class bar where I was accosted by a wildly drunken laborer. Everyone was painfully drunk–that manly near death atavistic Viking berserk hallucination of everything, and I thought: “all these years, so many wounds, so few praises.” That was when a man I did not know turned to me and said: "You are a Jew!" "You’re right," I said, since I was young and in love with poetry, "I am a Jew!" It was the first time I’d ever felt the pins of anti-Semitism, I, a Lutheran with a long beard. He reached for me then but missed and grabbed another man. "You are a Jew!" he shouted. "No, it is I," I said, "I am the Jew!" But it was too late. They were on the floor and cursing, two men who had forgotten the oldest notion of them all: in Jewish history there are no coincidences.

As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “bias is a clunker” and though it must be taken seriously, if you’re one of its chapter headings having a shield of irony becomes essential. You’re a cripple. You don’t belong in here. Don’t belong on this website, on this campus, don’t belong in a customary place of business. For years I used to carry custom made stickers depicting the universal disability access symbol inside a red circle with a line through it. I’d paste them on the doors of inaccessible restaurants and academic buildings and the like. I really need to get more of them but I can’t remember where I they came from, and as I say, I’m in danger of weariness. Dear young Cripples, I’ve been fighting a long time. Thank God for ADAPT. And don’t stop fighting. But don’t stop laughing either. As the great disability writer and activist Neil Marcus says: “Disability is not a ‘brave struggle’ or ‘courage in the face of adversity’…Disability is an art. it’s an ingenious way to live.”

Once while I was teaching at The Ohio State University I was invited to a meeting with a dozen faculty and former astronaut and Senator John Glenn. We discussed the future of digital teaching. Afterwards I boarded a Columbus City bus only to face a woman who loudly asked if she “could pray for me”. She assumed blindness was a sad matter—or worse—a sign I needed spiritual rescue. My guide dog shook his collar. Suddenly I felt wickedly improvisational. I stood up, grabbed the overhead pedestrian bar, and announced loudly so every passenger could hear: “Certainly Madame you may pray for me, but only if I can pray for you, and in turn pray for all the sad souls on this bus—souls buttressed on all sides by tragedies and losses, by DNA and misadventures in capitalism, for we’re all sorrowing Madame, we’re all chaff blown by the cruel winds of post-modernism. Let us pray, now, together; let’s all hold hands!” She fled the bus at the next stop. Strangers applauded. Improvisation allows us to force the speed of associational changes, transforming the customs of disability life. Disability Studies scholar Petra Kuppers writes: If the relations between embodiment and meaning become unstable, the unknown can emerge not as site of negativity but as the launch pad for new explorations. By exciting curiosities, by destabilizing the visual as conventionalized primary access to knowledge, and by creating desires for new constellations of body practice, these disability performances can attempt to move beyond the known into the realm of bodies as generators of positive difference.

The polarizations, magnetic fields of crippledness are generators. It is not true that rebellion simply makes us old. We’re old when we give up.

And yet…the fights before us are promising to be both rewarding and very hard.

So I have the happenstance blues. They’re both accidental (aleatoric) and whatever is the opposite of accident, which, depending on your point of view might have something to do with the means of production, racial determinism from same, or all the other annotated bigotries of the culture club. As a disabled writer I know a good deal about the culture club. Now back to my happenstance blues…

I’m right here. I’m terribly inconvenient. Blind man at conference. Blind man in the lingerie shop. All built environments are structured and designed strategically to keep my kind out. My kind includes those people who direct their wheelchairs with breathing tubes, amble with crutches, speak with signs, type to speak, roll oxygen tanks, ask for large print menus or descriptive assistance. I’m here standing against the built geographical concentrations of capital development. I’m here. I’m the penny no one wants anymore. My placement is insufficiently circulatory in the public spaces of capital. Which came first, the blues or the architectural determinism that keeps me always an inconvenience?

Capital creates landscapes and determines how the gates will function. Of course there was a time before capital accumulation. It’s no coincidence the disabled were useful before capitalism. The blind were vessels of memory. The blind recited books. Disability is a strategic decision. Every disabled person either knows this or comes a cropper against the gates when they least expect it.

What interests me is how my happenstance-disability-blues are exacerbated by neoliberal capital accumulation. For accumulation one must thing of withholding money from the public good or dispossession, which is of course how neoliberal capital works. Here is geographer David Harvey in an interview, talking about just this:

Accumulation by dispossession is about dispossessing somebody of their assets or their rights. Traditionally there have been rights which have common property, and one of the ways in which you take these away is by privatizing them. We’ve seen moves in recent years to privatize water. Traditionally, everybody had had access to water, and [when] it gets privatized, you have to pay for it. We’ve seen the privatization of a lot of education by the defunding of the public sector, and so more and more people have to turn to the private sector. We’ve seen the same thing in health care.

What we’re talking about here is the taking away of universal rights, and the privatization of them, so it [becomes] your particular responsibility, rather than the responsibility of the state. One of the proposals which we now have is the privatization of Social Security. Social Security may not be that generous, but it’s universal and everybody has part of it. What we are now saying is, "That shouldn’t be; it should be privatized," which, of course, means that people will then have to invest in their own pension funds, which means more money goes to Wall Street. So this is what I call privatization by dispossession in our particular circumstance.

At the neoliberal university and all its concomitant conferences, workshops, and “terms abroad” (just to name some features of higher ed where my own disability has been problematized) the provision of what we call “reasonable accommodations” under the Americans with Disabilities Act is often considered to be in opposition to accumulation. For instance: I was asked to teach a term abroad in Istanbul. When I pointed out that Istanbul isn’t a guide dog friendly city and that I’d have trouble with the traffic and requested a sighted guide accompany me there, I was told this was too expensive. Think about it! One additional human being to keep me from getting run over was too expensive! The “term abroad” was actually designed to accumulate capital, right down to the lint in each student’s and instructor’s pockets. I decided to avoid getting run over and didn’t go.

Privatized culture means everything, including your safety is your own responsibility. I’m in mind of this. I’m not fooled.

Yet I declare cripples are beautiful and we’re at the whirling heart of this life and never at the edges of the constellations.

Blind, alone, wandering a railway station, lost, and talking to strangers asking for help and they are silent.

Get on the wrong train.

**

Taxi driver tells me he loves dogs more than his family.

**

Winter announces it won’t ever give up. A raven walks on the ice.

**

Three drunken men try to help my friend who uses a wheelchair by offering to lift her up a short flight of steps outside an inaccessible restaurant. Everything is wrong about this. But they are cheerful smelly men.

**

The city embraces full darkness like a great musician.

I sang more as a kid than I do now. This is a problem. And though I still laugh I do that less enough as well. This is a problem. And the censorious mantle clock with its disdainful ancestry snicks and animal ghosts drift through the room reminding me of loves long gone. Like all the old people I walk out in the twilight and shake my bony fists at god and say I wasn’t counting on this. Of course its a problem. The best way to go is while singing like William Blake. Or tasting a cherry like that other guy I can’t remember. And there was not enough time, not enough time to see the true green in nature. But there is this walking wind.

“Many Blind Rivers”

When I think of the blind, the historical blind, those people who lived before the 20th century, I often recall a famous poem by Langston Hughes. The connection might not seem obvious but there are centuries of blind ancestors just as the famous poet, watching a river flow, understood there are countless black ancestors revealed by flowing waters. Hughes poem, entitled “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” begins:

I’ve known rivers: 

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins. 

With this opening Langston Hughes tells us we’re talking about the human spirit which is always ebbing and flowing, is steady, primordial, and ever present. Looking in a river we can see ourselves and thousands of others. 

It’s a trick poets play reading the poems of others—we insert words—testing whether a brilliant line or stanza might somehow become our own. (I’m risking my poetic license by giving away a poetry trick.) Several years ago I stole Langston Hughes title and wrote: “A Blind Man Speaks of Rivers” for I was feeling a connection with the nameless blind who’ve gone before me. Back to Hughes’ poem:

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

Poetry descends from mythology and mythological thinking. In a myth the past, present, and future are connected intimately and occur simultaneously. Langston Hughes’ narrator is a tutelary spirit guide who lives outside of customary time. Both the poet and his readers fly above the world looking down at the mural of history; not an abstract history, but an intensely human sequence of events. We’re alive with the ancestors. We bathe with them; look at the ancient Nile with them; work with them, raise Pyramids; travel to Louisiana beside Lincoln; we watch as the Mississippi’s mud turns maternal at sun down. 

When Langston Hughes says he can see the many worlds of his ancestors he’s declaring that everyone is still alive and everything is sacred. Walt Whitman comes to mind, anther poet of waters who calls to the past and future in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

I tossed aside my poem “A Blind Man Speaks of Rivers” but it served as a starting point because I wanted to create mythic space where our unnamed blind ancestors could live again, but more importantly where I could connect with them in human terms, delicately, intimately. 

My poem morphed into “Learning Braille at 39” which goes like this:

The dry universe 

gives up its fruit,

Black seeds are raining,

Pascal dreams of a wristwatch,

And heaven help me

The metempsychosis of book

Is upon me. I hunch over it,

The boy in the asylum

Whose fingers leapt for words.

(In the dark books are living things,

Quiescent as cats.)

Each time we lift them

We feel again 

The ache of amazement 

Under summer stars.

It’s a dread thing 

To be lonely

Without reason.

My window stays open

And I study late

As quick, musical laughter

Rises from the street

And I rub grains of the moon

In my hands.

Like Langston Hughes I aim in this poem to connect the living and the dead. I think of the blind who lived their lives shut away from society; of the peculiar energies of the Enlightenment, (Pascal Pascal dreams of clarity in the form of a time piece) and I imagine a blind child receiving the gift of literacy with the introduction of Braille, a marvel that comes to the blind both from its eponymous inventor and by way of the philosopher Denis Diderot who was the first to write that the blind could be taught to read–imagine! Think of the long sequence of bitter centuries in which the blind are thought to be no more sentient than infants, children thrown to the streets with fiddles and begging bowls. 

The invention of a tactile alphabet produced the promise of literacy for the blind, which sounds significant enough, but I think it’s also useful to think of literacy as Peter McClaren describes it: “an animated common trust in the power of love, a belief in the reciprocal power of dialogue, and a commitment to ‘conscientization’ and political praxis.” The blind appear in a communitarian sense when at last they’re given books and the means to read them. Books represent a common faith in the power of community. The blind child in an institution, given a book for the first time, holds the key to his future, and in a very real sense we are the descendants of that moment. We can read what we can’t see. (This is a matter that’s true for all readers and not just those with vision problems.) In a book you can touch the moon. 

Sometimes I read with my hands.  I am strong then. And my hands, so often clenched, fly open like a kildeer’s wings. Touch. Thrill. Memory. Forebears: those who existed before us but come alive when we’re again astonished by the potency and wonder of art.

How beautiful to see we’re still funny. Five people and no one is selling anything. One of us who has lost a lot of weight proudly lifts up his shirt and I say if he keeps this up, a piano will fall on him. The dog walks in with her dish clutched in her teeth. A five point buck looks in the window. Any moment now, Dr. Doolittle will drop by for coffee. See the laughing animals. Save the human textbook for tomorrow.

So it came down to this
Green in mind
Like that moment
A pill dissolves
So that I felt alive
Without permission
As free men do
As free children do—
A cob webbed forest
All about me

Outside three deer nosed a snow bank
A lonely neighbor carried a book
He might have been my grandfather
A minister with his bible
Walking the lanes
In the age of rickets
He too might be alive without permission
I am not a sad man
No one needs free will
O green in mind
Without mercy…

You never swim out into the same ocean
But I woke this morning
A flock of school children passing,
One child dragging a stick along the fence,
The music of a boy
Who has more than he can carry,
And I thought, I’m no longer
So fond of travel…
Not “old” but inside
I’m pushed now
Farther to a corner,
The birds of my flesh rising
Coursing over my house.

The Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski wrote in his diary: "I don’t experience my life as a road, a journey from the cradle to the grave, but as an object, a vessel that gradually fills up and, when full, falls apart."

I think it’s good to stay off the road.
It’s good to think of your body as an urn.
Climbing the stairs I imagine I’m carrying water.

**

In disability circles there’s a lot of talk about “gain” as in, being crippled one has advantages where critical thinking is concerned. I like this idea, but not as much as I like the urn. I’m just filling up. It doesn’t matter what I think about this. And it certainly doesn’t matter what road I imagine for myself.

**

“Look at that man! He’s one heavy urn!”

**

An urn walks into a bar. The bartender says “what’ll you have?” Urn says: